Research Plan

What can I do to better my habits?

After I estimated my impact on the environment, I realized that most of it comes from airplane flights. I am not flying anywhere this winter except for the Army, so I could simply calculate my lessened footprint from not flying to Latin America as I would normally do, but that is too simple. I bicycle everywhere, I recycle, I compost, I rarely eat out, and I keep my thermostat at 48 degrees F. A more pervasive aspect of my life is my use of batteries.

What about Batteries?

Where are they manufactured? What do they contain? How wasteful are they as energy vectors (how much input versus output)? What produces that energy in their manufacturing areas? What is their transport impact? I will replace them with rechargeable batteries, and deduct the impact of rechargeable batteries from that of disposable batteries. I will then calculate the number of units / months of use, that will be required for me to get to where the use of either has the same footprint, the number of units / months of use, that are required to make a really positive difference. Of course, I just got my charger and batteries in the mail, and right now I am deep in the red.

Looking for hard facts without much luck

I looked for information about this on Google, and the pickings seemed to be rather slim. To begin with, I eliminated anything that ended in .com, and wound up with a host of well-meaning but little informed, and almost never rigorous, websites. A commonly cited study was in fact commissioned by Uniross – a company that manufactures (you guessed it!) rechargeable batteries. According to them, switching to rechargeable batteries in Europe would divide the ecological impact of batteries on the environment by 28. I would assume that the numbers would be even better outside Europe, because outside Europe, cheap and very ineffective “Chinese” batteries are the norm. Here in Sitka, thanks to hydroelectric energy, supply chain inefficiencies, and somewhat low temperatures, the number would probably also be better. Of course, I hate to trust the manufacturer... Then there is the popular website Redefining Progress, which rates switching to rechargeable batteries on the same impact level as six degrees F of difference in air conditioning temperature. Clearly, there’s a disconnect here. One promising avenue is a European website, but most of what it does is advocate for recycling (recyclable NiMH batteries are recyclable as well).

Anthrotech

It's interesting to think of the school as a living organism - a beetle perhaps, with its clunky bricks-and-mortar exoskeleton. It's always easy to justify a bond measure to rebuild the school, because everybody knows how hard it is to learn in a leaky, unsecured building. Just the same, everyone knows that the school can't run without its living, breathing elements - namely, the students and teachers, and most people realize that the whole beast promptly becomes arthritic without a small regiment of janitors, administrators and bus drivers.

Now where does technology fit into this? How would I convince the city to allocate precious tax dollars to some software?

The interface between people and ideas is increasingly a digital one. Computers would be the dumbest idea ever devised, if knowledge really were a one-person endeavor. The reason we need them is so that Joe student and Jane teacher can access the world's knowledge database both as consumers and producers of content. Any school that realizes this can acquire a significant edge over any paper-based school, simply because it is connected.

While doing this Anthrotech assignment, I learned that at least at Sitka High, technology is mostly used by a small minority of teachers. I also learned that the opportunities for teachers to place content online are currently greater than the opportunities for students to place content online, even though the opposite seems to be occurring.